Red Auerbach, 89, Who Built a Basketball Dynasty

By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

Published: October 30, 2006

Red Auerbach, who built the Boston Celtics into one of the greatest dynasties in sports, presiding over 16 National Basketball Association championship teams as a coach, general manager and club president, died Saturday in Washington. He was 89.

His death was announced by the Celtics. The cause was a heart attack, The Associated Press reported.

A presence in pro basketball for 60 years -- his coaching career stretching back to the birth of the N.B.A. -- Auerbach had a relentless will to win and he was a supreme judge of talent. He was a combative figure who always sought an edge, whether taunting his foes by lighting premature victory cigars on the bench or going jaw to jaw with the referees. Auerbach coached the Celtics to nine N.B.A. championships, eight of them consecutively from 1959 to 1966. He built another six championship teams as the Celtics' general manager and oversaw a final one, in 1986, as the team's president, a position he held at the time of his death.

When Auerbach turned over the Celtics' coaching position to his star center Bill Russell in 1966, after 20 seasons as an N.B.A. coach and 16 of them in Boston, he was No. 1 in career victories with a record of 938-479. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1969 and he was named the greatest coach in N.B.A. history by the Professional Basketball Writers Association of America in 1980.

His nine N.B.A. championships as a coach have been equaled only by Phil Jackson, who won six with the Chicago Bulls and three with the Los Angeles Lakers.

Auerbach was also a pioneer in race relations. In 1950, his first season coaching the Celtics, he chose Chuck Cooper of Duquesne University as the first black player selected in an N.B.A. draft. In the 1963-64 season, the Celtics became the first N.B.A. team to start a game with an all-black lineup: Russell, K. C. Jones, Sam Jones, Tom Sanders and Willie Naulls.

When Auerbach named Russell as his coaching successor, it was the first time a black had become coach of a major American professional sports team.

A Brooklyn native, Auerbach took his place among the historical figures of New England on his 68th birthday, when a life-size statue of him was unveiled in Boston's Faneuil Hall. Auerbach's book ''Basketball for the Player, the Fan and the Coach,'' written in the early 1950's, has been widely translated.

Auerbach was consumed by a quest to excel on the basketball court. It brought him something of a lonely existence. Because his wife, Dorothy, and their two daughters remained at the Auerbachs' home in Washington during the long basketball winters, family life seldom encroached on his single-minded devotion to the sport.

''The game was my livelihood, my whole guts,'' he said in ''Red Auerbach: An Autobiography,'' written with Joe Fitzgerald. As he put it: ''I had to win. I wanted to be good in whatever I did. I wanted to be the very best teacher I possibly could be. I wanted to be the very best player I could possibly be. And I wanted to be the very best coach I could possibly be. Could I be a good coach and lose? To me, that's like asking if a guy can be a good doctor even though his patients keep dying.''

Auerbach was often crusty and left no question as to who was the boss, although he considered his players' suggestions on strategy. Insisting on team play over individual goals, he created an aura around the Celtics perhaps matched in American sports only by the Yankees' mystique.

''He wanted everybody to know that when they put on a Celtics uniform, they were part of a tradition, something that was worth working for,'' Wayne Embry, a former Celtics center and later an N.B.A. coach and executive, once told The Chicago Tribune. ''He'd bark and growl at his players, but there was always a reason for it, and they got the message. On the Celtics, you accepted your role and took pride in being the best.''

Arnold Jacob Auerbach was born Sept. 20, 1917, in Brooklyn. His father was an immigrant from Russia who ran a dry-cleaning business. Everyone called him Red from the days when he helped in the family business. A 5-foot-10 guard, he played basketball at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn and at George Washington University.

His college coach, Bill Reinhart, who taught a fast-break style that few teams used in those days, proved to be a major influence on his tactics. Auerbach was soon teaching the game, coaching high school basketball in Washington.

After serving in the Navy during World War II, Auerbach made his pro coaching debut with the 1946-47 Washington Capitols in the inaugural season of the Basketball Association of America, the forerunner of the N.B.A. He coached the Capitols to the Eastern Division title with a 49-11 regular-season record, although the Philadelphia Warriors won the league championship. After three seasons with the Capitols, Auerbach coached the Tri-Cities Blackhawks, a team based in Illinois, for a season.

In 1950, Walter Brown, the founder and owner of the Celtics, an original N.B.A. franchise but a floundering team with little fan support, hired Auerbach as coach and gave him full authority over the basketball operations. Boston was a baseball and a hockey town, the Red Sox and the Bruins dominating the sports scene at a time when pro basketball was a poor relation to the college game.